Google Reader Becomes Holiday Snitch (Part 2)
This article is by Jason Lee Miller and he is a WebProNews editor and writer. He covers mainly on the business and technology section. Read about this article where he mention about the Google Reader. You know have use Google Reader before I hope.
Google’s response to the complaints wasn’t taken well, either. A spokesperson, signing his post only “Graham,” made Google’s official stance that the complaints were coming from a “small subset” of users and most people seemed to like the new shared feature. They’d work on it, but it being the holidays and all, improvements might come a little slower than usual.
Graham noted previously that “The ’share’ feature was always intended to imply some amount of publicity. That’s why we used the term ’share’ and had shared items marked as public by default on the Settings > Tags page.”
In other words, it’s the users’ fault, not ours that your feeds were shared with people you didn’t want to see them. Somehow I think that’s not going to fly with incensed users. But if they don’t like it, there’s an option. Says Graham, “If you’re uncomfortable sharing items, you can unshare everything in a single click.”
Or delete your entire shared items history. You know, after your mom or your competitors have already had access to it. The only way to block a contact from viewing the shared items is to delete them from your contacts list entirely, an option one disgruntled user called “insane.”
Google’s going to need to get a grip on this before it balloons into a debacle similar to Facebook’s (if it hasn’t already). Privacy advocates already are keeping a sharp eye on the company. This won’t help their case a bit.
Filed under: Webmasters
